Thiruvananthapuram
Ambulances screeching across the national highways and city roads carrying patients who require emergency medical care or fire engines rushing to a disaster site often gets entangled in traffic signals, losing precious moments which could ultimately make the difference between life and death.
Rather than engage the police to create a green channel for ambulances and fire engines, what if the traffic was so regulated that an approaching ambulance gets green signal automatically, all the way to its destination?
Danish Salim, who heads the Emergency Medicine department at PRS Hospital in the city has devised a smart device, Accident Smart Alert Programme -Emergency (ASAP EM), which if installed in ambulances and fire engines can send alerts to an approaching traffic signal so as to enable these vehicles to pass through.
ASAP EM is programmed to send alerts to an approaching traffic signal one km ahead and again when it is 500 metres away. The traffic signal would immediately change the signal to green and halts all other lanes so that the emergency vehicle can easily pass through.
Dr. Salim says that the device had been tested at the Automotive Research Assoiation of India in Ahmedabad and found to be working perfectly.
“The device is encrypted so that it cannot be used in another vehicle or misused. It could be affixed in all ambulances which are part of the State’s trauma management system, so that no time is lost on the road in providing emergenccy assistance,” he says.
ASAP EM plus a host of innovations, all linked to emergency medicine -- including the bike ambulance system to reach rural interior roads and portable Emergency jump kits which has more than 100 medicines and vital equipment like defibrillator, oxygen cylinders, nebuliser, suction apparatus etc -- won him the Best Innovator award at the international emergency medicine conference at Jaipur early in November, claims Dr. Salim.
EOM
